The item you selected is unavailable. It may have been moved, renamed or removed. Do you want to remove it from the list?

Question

Hi there,

I am experiencing errors when trying to open recent documents, by right-clicking the Word icon on my taskbar, see image below.

The issue seems to be limited to Office programs, as recent items from other programs work as they should.

I am running Windows 10 Home on a 64-bit system and Office Professional Plus 2016.

I have tried to fix this issue with solutions I found online (including: rebooting system, clearing jump lists, unpinning and repinning the taskbar shortcut), however nothing has worked so far.

Please help me.

Answer 1

There are thousands of copies of this same question to sift through, and all of them have exactly the same set of questions which evade the issue: Why did Microsoft send an update that screws up the Taskbar shortcuts?  Why is the fix to this endlessly repeated problem not easily and readily available? How do we restore the functionality of what were good shortcuts from the task bar in jump lists after Windows Update destroys them? The LOCATION is the hard drive, as it always was. We didn't make changes., Microsoft did. Today a hundred things on the PC are broken and if you're in a hurry to get some work done, you're out of luck because the answer to your query will be "Gee did you change something?" If it says the files are not available, that means "the files are not available" which would cause Windows to report that "the FILES are NOT AVAILABLE" although they are in exactly the same location on our hard drives that they were BEFORE the latest "Windows Update"

The endless repetition of the same errors, year after year, with the answers all but hidden god knows where, requiring a forty step solution to undo the damage done to our filing systems. So frustrating. If Microsoft would just leave us alone...

Answer 2

I am having this exact same problem with Word/Excel 2016 on Windows 10.

I get the "Item you selected is not available" message when trying to open a file from the jump list but if I right-click and Open, it opens just fine.

I uninstalled Office 2016 and reinstalled and it worked correctly for a few days but then started again.  An update must have been installed.

I have Office 2013 Pro also installed and that might be causing the problem but I don't want to uninstall because I use Access which isn't part of my 2016 suite.

For now I guess I'll just keep right-clicking and hitting Open unless someone finds a solution.  I have tried numerous suggestions found through searches such as deleting AutomaticDestinations, etc.

Answer 3

Hi Stefan,

Yes I can access these documents from the recent list within Word.

In addition, I found out I am able to access the documents by right-clicking the document in the recent list on the task bar. So while clicking that document directly gives an error, right-clicking the document and clicking open, does work fine.

Answer 4

Hi Stefan,

The file in the example was saved to my desktop and is still there. Other files, located in My Documents have not been moved, yet are inaccessible through 'Recent items'.

Answer 5

Where are you saving files? Perhaps the location is temporarily unavailable for some reason (which would cause Windows to report a missing source).